Category Archives: Best Practices

A Tool in Every Service Provider’s Toolbox: Explore Analytics

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Service providers are called upon to meet rapidly evolving customer challenges. Delivering quality service requires a toolbox full of flexible, agile tools to meet every new requirement.

For analytics requirements, you need Explore Analytics in your toolbox to ensure you deliver reports and dashboards that empower your customers and uncover the insights they need.

Why? Because Explore Analytics is engineered to be:

  • Flexible enough to tackle every reporting problem
  • Simple enough to ensure you don’t wait for change requests, code changes, or data replication
  • Agile enough to bridge every island of data

The Flexible Tool for Every Reporting Problem

Explore Analytics was designed from day one as a fully-featured business intelligence tool. As such, it is full of advanced features that can easily combine data across tables, apply formulas, and present vivid visualizations. With this comprehensive set of features, Explore Analytics is a get-out-of-jail free card for your most complicated reporting needs.

With Explore Analytics at your side, you can embrace your customer’s most ambitious reporting ideas. Instead of being limited to the same basic trends and category charts, you can create advanced real-time analytics that will transform your customer’s processes and delight their executives.

Insight Shouldn’t Wait – For Change Requests, Code, or Data Replication

Customers often ask for insights without knowing if the data is arranged to make such reports easy to build. For those who understand the structure of the data, it can be frustrating to have all the data you need yet be unable to produce the report simply because it is stored in the wrong format or across too many tables.

Many solutions begin with re-architecting the data until it fits the report you’re trying to create. This could include a combination of javascript code to reformat or copy data, administrative changes to tables or fields, or – worst of all – replicating the data out of ServiceNow to a place where you can spend more time and effort rearchitecting the database.

Instead of fitting your data to your reports, Explore Analytics access the data where it is and provides a suite of tools to allow you to meet your reporting needs without changing ServiceNow or removing data to another database. Any reformatting, formulas, or combinations across tables are done easily within the tool, using some configurable drop-downs.

That means you don’t need to wait for QA, code reviews, release cycles, or other cumbersome processes. You also don’t need to take on the risk that these changes will impact the functioning of ServiceNow or other platforms. Any business analyst can easily transform the data into insights without worrying about the impact to anyone else.

Bridge Every Island of Data to Every Audience

Explore Analytics is architected to connect quickly and easily to multiple sources of data. Without moving any of the data around, you can easily combine data from ServiceNow, call systems, data warehouses, or other adjacent platforms. Instead of silos of data, Explore Analytics allows you to provide insights based on your full context.

Once you’ve built those reports, Explore Analytics also lets you bring that data to audiences regardless of what tools they use. ServiceNow users can access Explore Analytics reports directly on their homepages, drilling through and acting immediately. On the other hand, executives who prefer reports delivered via email can get stand-alone interactive dashboards delivered to them, without requiring logging in to any tools. Meanwhile, your customers can present data in intranet portals, on public websites, in mobile apps – wherever they want their data to be accessed by the best audience.

Explore Analytics: Don’t Leave Home Without It

As a service provider, you want to have the right tools in your toolbox to ensure that you will meet and exceed any challenge your customers ask you to solve. With Explore Analytics, you have the comfort of knowing that you have an all-purpose reporting tool that will rise to meet your customer’s needs, no matter how complex.

By providing a flexible tool, not relying on code or administrative changes, and bridging islands of data together, Explore Analytics will turn your focus away from “how can I solve this?” to “how will I delight my customer next?”

Analytics: A Phase One Requirements 

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When you are embarking on a new implementation of ServiceNow or deploying a new application, reports and analytics must be a key requirement in your initial phase.

Too often, I hear organizations limiting initial implementations to only basic reports, or scope analytics for a future phase.

Instead, proactive organizations get more value out of implementations by crafting advanced reports early in the process and iterating alongside the process improvements. Building advanced analytics early improves user workflow, develops more reliable data, and helps executives see value early.

Smart Dashboards Driving Efficient Work on Day One

The goal of implementing a new ServiceNow instance or application is to create a more efficient workflow for your users. Smart real-time dashboards are a powerful tool in the tool kit, focusing your users on the most urgent tasks and synthesizing information in ways that enable quick response.

In this example, the work dashboard goes beyond simple pie and bar charts to give users the information they need in order to act:

Scorecards focus the user’s attention on critical information, like the stale incidents, aged incidents, and breached SLAs that the user is responsible for.

Critically, rather than simply showing a flat list of tasks, each of the reports focuses on the age of assigned tasks, allowing the user to prioritize those assignments that are closest to breaching SLAs or becoming overdue.

One organization used Explore Analytics to reduce stale incidents by 30%, simply by providing users’ dashboards with advanced analytics focused on stale incidents.

Rather than going live with a solution that leaves your users in the dark, deploy your instance or application tailored to the way you want your users to work on day one.

More Reliable Data through Data Analysis

 

Often, I hear administrators saying that advanced analytics is scoped for future phases of deployment because the data in the instance or application isn’t ready yet.

This overlooks the important role that advanced analytics plays in ensuring that the data being collected is reliable.

For instance, this CMDB Quality Dashboard allows business service owners to take an active role in ensuring that the CMDB data is reliable and up-to-date for their services:

Each tab focuses the user on potential data issues that need to be addressed. They can drill through and take action to correct data quality issues.

Rather than waiting for data issues to resolve themselves, advanced analytics drive the data improvement. Users throughout the organization become involved in ensuring reliable and up-to-date data that can power analytics in other use cases.

Executive Visibility from the Very Beginning

 

By capturing trends of data from the beginning, executives can see the impact of the implementation over time. By setting key KPI’s early, executives can see how the new instance or application is being used by users.

This report, for example, combines information from two different data sources, both ServiceNow and the legacy ticketing tool used prior to ServiceNow:

The line in orange shows the flow of incidents before ServiceNow was enabled, and projects based on the old trend. The line in blue shows the flow of incidents after ServiceNow was enabled, and the projects the reduction of incidents into the future.

For each key KPI, executives can be assured that their priorities are being tracked and managed to through visibility on day one.

Achieve Value Early with Analytics on Day One

As you can see, there is important value left on the table if analytics aren’t included in your new instance or application. With powerful analytics, you can shape how users are working, improve the quality if your data, and ensure executives can transparently track your successes.

With an easy-to-use reporting tool, you can get started immediately. Get started early and iterate your reports to ensure that you start on the right foot from the beginning.